


AU: Melissa Didn't Die

by DarlaBlack



Series: Scenario: 5 Things [3]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 20:36:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15421089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: An AU/5 Headcanons in which Melissa Scully doesn't die at the end of Paper Clip.





	AU: Melissa Didn't Die

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the tumblr challenge, "Give me an AU scenario, and I'll write 5 headcanons for it." Some truly amazing stuff came out of this challenge, most way better than mine.

**1.** In the hospital, Mulder finds her seated at Melissa’s side with wet eyes and a heavy heart. Maggie greets him stiffly before excusing herself to let them talk. He watches her go and wonders if she blames him, as he wondered the same just months ago, while her other daughter lay in a bed like this. He crouches beside her, and Scully lets her head fall to his shoulder. She tells him it should have been her, that it’s not fair for her family to suffer because of her choices. Without mutual investments—without mutual lost sisters—he is afraid that she will leave him now. He speaks to her of justice, of fate, of wanting the same things. He says that the answers are in the X-Files.

Scully stands at a crossroads where her future life with Mulder—the adventure, the chase, the quest for the answers to Big Questions—diverges from some other possible life. She knows that if she stays with him now, she will never be able to let go. But she’s also seen what the cost might be and now realizes how much she has to loose.

She tells Mulder she needs some time. Heart breaking, he tells her to take what she needs.

 

**2.**  Melissa’s recovery is slow and painstaking, and Scully helps her through every step. The sisters grow closer than they’ve ever been, until eventually, they are both ready to go back to work. By then it is October and chilly. Mulder has had months to learn, to remember, what life without Scully is like. They’ve talked on the phone, had lunch a few times, and he’s visited with both her and Melissa, but it has of course not been the same. He’s a little lost without her. In the first few weeks, he picks up his phone at least twice a day to call her, then puts it down again. When it’s time for her to come back, they meet first at his apartment so he can catch her up on work: a boy who could control lightning, a serial killer who murdered psychics, a death-row inmate taking revenge from beyond the grave. No leads on the men who shot Melissa. She smiles as he recounts how hard it was to work without her—is sad that he’s faced these cases alone. She relaxes on his couch, sipping a lukewarm beer with her head against the cushions, and he marvels at how soft she seems, how like she was when he first met her. She wears an oversized sweater and jeans, hair in a ponytail that reminds him of their case in the arctic.

Suddenly, he sees her as she could be, two possible versions: with him and without. Without him she is autumn colors, warm hands, laughing around a dinner table in sweaters like this one. With him, she is dressed in black, sharp as broken glass, hard like iron. Part of him wants to tell her to run, as fast as she can, away from him, to preserve this soft, smiling Scully. But another part of him is selfish.

He wonders if there is a way he can have both.

 

**3.** She does not feel bound to him by obligation and by mutual suffering, but by a desire to protect life, to save what’s worth saving. When Robert Patrick Modell nearly pushes him to suicide, Scully realizes the life she most wants to protect is theirs, together. When they stand in front of the killer’s hospital bed, instead of taking Mulder’s hand, she reaches up to touch his face. “Your life is more important than the truth,” she tells him softly, thumb at his cheek. “If you wouldn’t sacrifice me, don’t sacrifice yourself.” And then she kisses him once, quickly, on the lips, before turning to go.

Mulder is left stunned. He watches the empty space of the door and brings his fingers to his lips, where an electric tingle remains. He thinks how he’d like more of that, maybe every day for the rest of his life. He thinks about what it might mean if he let himself love her. He thinks of a life where their love is like a weapon, one that fights back darkness and monsters. He smiles.

 

**4.**  In Blue Ridge, Georgia, they find themselves not so much between a rock and a hard place, as, well, on a rock surrounded by  _no_  place. She tells him about her father, about their mutual love of  _Moby Dick_ , while he shivers and makes jokes. She thinks of Big Blue and Samantha, and the way he hurls himself toward any underdog prophet of improbable wisdom, but when she compares him to Ahab, he shakes his head.

“I don’t think so, Scully.”

“You don’t think you’re single-mindedly devoted to a single quest at the cost of everything else that might give meaning to your life?”

He shakes his head  _no_  again, smiling a little smugly.

“Well what the hell else is there then?”

And he surprises her by pulling her down and kissing her right there on that rock, in the dark, where they keep each other warm instead of shivering alone, until help comes.

 

**5.**  Almost a year later, a man named Leonard Betts terrifies her with soft words in the back of an ambulance. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but you have something I need.”

Rather than bury her fear in desperate rebellion, in the arms of another man, she turns to Mulder. He holds her, kisses her, makes love to her in the shadows of pre-dawn in her apartment and tells her it will be okay. They are so much stronger together. He goes with her to Georgetown Memorial and holds her hand as the doctor walks in with X-Ray films. There are no awkward flowers and lame jokes, but there are shared tears and then shared strength. Their love is a thousand watt bulb, and it burns away the darkness.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Birth Day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15932168) by [DarlaBlack](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack)




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